Ike Okonta remembers Ken Saro-Wiwa -

It was a light that the wealthy and powerful found discomforting, and they resolved to extinguish it. Ken Saro-Wiwa was saying things they did not want to hear, even if all of it was true. Even more worrying, he had mobilized his people, the Ogoni, a small ethnic group in Nigeria’s Niger Delta where Royal/Dutch Shell and several other transnational companies had been producing oil for four decades without giving them any of the proceeds, to stand up and insist that enough was enough.

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London is one of my favourite cities. Perhaps this is
because the city and her people gave me refuge in the mid 1990s when I needed
it most. This worthy tradition, providing succour to the persecuted, goes back
many years. Karl Marx, the great political thinker and activist, found shelter
in this city in the mid 19^th century even when German government
officials were hot on his heels.

 
I was in  London when the bombs went off two weeks ago.
Like all true Londoners, I felt a deep sense of shock. And then the feeling was
replaced with anger – anger at the young men who had perpetrated this outrage,
murdering innocent people; anger at the Whitehall politicians who had made these
young men desperate enough to kill; anger at the men in dark suits whose
insatiable greed has so deformed British politics that politicians could take
unpopular decisions and still remain in power.

Let us be clear about the
real source of the bombs that killed innocent Londoners two weeks ago: it is
unaccountable, irresponsible power. This city of seven million people was
opposed to the war in Iraq.
They came out in their numbers and marched on the streets when it became clear
that the Prime Minister they had elected to protect them was contemplating
joining President George Bush in his outrageous scheme to wage war on Iraq under false pretentences. 

The citizens of  London said a loud and
unequivocal No, Not in Our Name! They said it was not true that Saddam had
weapons capable of destroying London
and other Western cities in a matter of minutes. They said they were tired of
war and warmongers. They said they wanted to live in peace with their Muslim neighbours. But their Prime Minister
ignored their pleas and went to war. British troops joined their American counterparts
and began to drop bombs on the innocent people of  Iraq.  Cities were flattened. Bullets
and disease reaped a bountiful harvest.

Iraq  is now a country at war with
itself, siring warlords and suicide bombers the way pigs sire sows. And British
and American troops are still bogged down in that hellish inferno of their own
creation even as I write.  Two weeks ago the suicide
bombers made and nurtured in  Iraq
paid  London  a
visit. The Sunday Times of London put its finger on the pulse of this tragedy when
it reported last week that British intelligence had commissioned a secret
report on the likely impact of the  Iraqi war on British Muslims and
warned that the conflict would embitter and radicalize them. 

LondonThe murder of innocent
Londoners can never be excused. But my point is that this is murder that could
have been avoided. Suicide bombers are made, not born. The young Muslims of
Leeds who perpetrated this horrendous act were ordinary, well-adjusted kids
before something happened to them and pushed them beyond the pale of civilized,
humane conduct. That ‘something’ was  Iraq.  Once British troops
invaded  Iraq, and it was
made clear to these young men that the people of  Iraq were blameless and that this
was a war waged against their fellow Muslims by a handful of amoral politicians
and businessmen in the Christian West, life became intolerable. Indeed, life
became meaningless.  All that mattered thereafter was honour. And honour
demanded that they even the score. Tragically, they chose to reply evil with
evil. And innocent   London and her citizens were left holding the can.   

It is important, very
important, that the world understand that it is not a coincidence that the
bombing of Londoners occurred the same week they had come out to sing and dance
for Africa in their beautiful city, and also march in Scotland to force Western
leaders to stop aiding and abetting the slaughter of Africa’s children through
cruel economic and political policies. The bombings, the Live Eight concert in
London, and the citizens’ protest at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland are all
part of ongoing attempts to resist the scheme by the New Victorians to reduce
large swathes of the world to perpetual charity cases.

Africa’s present
state is the result of purposeful and premeditated political action on the part
of rightwing European and American political and business leaders and their
allies on the African continent. When Tony Blair mounts his
moral high horse and declares that he is determined to ‘help’ Africa in his
last term as Prime Minister, the fact is obscured that Africa is not helpless.  Nor are the people of Africa 
mendicants asking for charity.   

This political action came
in two shock waves – first in the early sixties just as African countries shook
off the shackles of colonialism and were marching towards economic
independence, and second, in the mid 1980s when a resurgent Neoconservatism led
by Ronald Reagan and Margareth Thatcher began to remake the world to conform to
their vision of a human community where only the powerful, the greedy, and the
amoral survived.

Mobutu, who was put in
power in the   Congo  by
European and American political and economic interests in the early 1960s,
represented the first phase in the assault on  Africa
in the 20^th century. General Ibrahim Babangida of   Nigeria  whom Margareth Thatcher celebrated in
her autobiography as the epitome of civic virtue in  Africa ,
represented the second phase. Mobutu deployed crude violence to ensure that  Congo ’s wealth
remained available to his Western paymasters. Babangida worked with the IMF and
the World Bank to impose Reagan’s vision of rapine capitalism come unhinged on Nigeria. 

Charles Dickens’ powerful novels, set in London in the age of Queen Victoria, depict wealthy businessmen and politicians concerned to ‘help’ the British poor. These poor
souls were seen as lazy, shiftless, and given to drink. It was entirely their
fault that they were poor. The rich and powerful demonstrated their Christian
virtue by giving them alms. It did not occur to the latter that their vicious
economic policies, the inhumane conditions in their factories, and their
political ploys which denied the poor their right to vote, were the primary cause
of the latter’s poverty.

As in the age of   Victoria, so it is in  Africa
today. Traditional Western powers, mainly  France
and Britain ,
work with unscrupulous African ‘leaders’ to deny the vote to millions on the
continent. Western corporations pillage  Africa’s
wealth aided by machine guns supplied by Western governments. IMF and World Bank
officials sit on African governments today and insist that no money be spent on
healthcare and education. This is why  AFrica
is poor. This is why Africa’s children are dying.   

There is now talk that the
recent spate of ‘debt forgiveness’ will resuscitate   Africa .
There is also talk that the elimination of trade barriers in Western countries
will enable   Africa  ‘trade’ her way out of
poverty. But all this is idle talk. Commodity prices have been falling on world
markets for the past 200 years. Celebrating debt ‘forgiveness’ without tackling
the cruel politics that put   Africa into debt peonage in the first place does not make sense.  I grieve for London’s and Africa ’s dead. 

Let us struggle peacefully to eliminate the New Victorian mentality that birthed
this tragedy.

Ike Okonta

Ike Okonta is a Nigerian writer and activist and was recently shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Literature for his novel "Tindi in the Land of the Dead".  He also co-authored Where Vultures Feast: Shell Human Rights and Oil in the Niger Delta"  Ike regularly contributes to Black Looks.  The article also appears in  Nigerian daily "This Day".

I took a train trip from San Francisco to Palo Alto, the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, last week. Palo Alto is home to Stanford University, easily one of the leading universities on America’s west coast. It is also a very beautiful city, the stomping ground of billionaire businessmen who made their pile powering what is now known world-wide as the Information Technology revolution.

It was a pleasant train journey. It was a warm spring afternoon. The sun was out, bathing the streets in a golden hue. The railway line to Palo Alto passes through California’s Bay Area, a cluster of cities and towns on the edge of the stunningly beautiful San Francisco Bay. The Bay Area is famous for its progressive politics, enlightened and engaged citizenry, and billionaire businessmen noted for spending great piles of cash on worthy causes to make our common earth a better and kinder place.

As the train chugged comfortingly along, I became lost in reverie. Looking out of the window as town after town passed by, I saw ordinary women and men going about the daily, humdrum business of living: shopkeepers tending their wares, auto mechanics fiddling underneath cars with spanners and screw-drivers, ice-cream vendors meandering their pleasantly-coloured vans through somnolent, sun-dappled streets.

[Read more…]

Pa Jim Wiwa

Pa Jim Beeson Wiwa, Ken’s father, died the way he lived, fighting. Even when by last Easter it was clear to members of his family that the end was near, he still clung to life, summoning Dr Owens Wiwa, his younger son, to his side now and again. His words were barely coherent, but their import was clear: ‘The Ogoni have won the struggle against their tormentors. Ken has won. Victory is ours.’

Owens would recount these intermittent encounters to me while we were together in Port Harcourt last month. To the uninformed and the unintelligent, Pa Wiwa’s words would not have made sense. What victory when the Ogoni are still weighed down by poverty, denied their civic and social rights, and their hero Ken still pining away in an unmarked grave? What victory when Shell, the chief architect of their misery, is still strutting her stuff all over the Niger delta, spreading destruction and mayhem wherever she puts down her oil rigs?

But then it is in the nature of the old and wise to see far into the future; to journey where mortal eyes cannot see, and to divine the profound truths wrapped up in the seeds of time. Pa Jim Beeson Wiwa embarked on that journey shortly before he left his mortal remain, and what he saw and relayed back to his younger son, Owens, gave those of us who have resolved to continue Ken’s work great comfort. Justice and truth will triumph in the fullness of time.

To recount Papa Jim Wiwa’s life history is also to recount the history of our nation. Born in 1904, he grew up in an Ogoni given over to the needs and designs of imperial Britain and her Proconsul in Nigeria, Frederick Lugard. The sacking of Ogoni and her incorporation into what later became known as colonial Nigeria was a particularly brutal affair.

The Ogoni, it must be remembered, are a republican people, fiercely jealous of their freedom, and refusing to bow down before rulers not of their own making. The highest unit of political aggregation and power in precolonial Ogoni was the village. The village head, though a descendant of one of the original founders of the village, was elected by popular acclaim. All Ogoni were citizens, men and women. And all participated in facilitating the ascension of the village head to power.

Land was the all-important means of production and also the central store of wealth. Yet all land was held in common, and you accessed it in virtue of your belonging to the community, and subscribing to its overarching norms and values. There were taboos and decrees, the violation of which was visited with appropriate sanctions. The citizens of pre-colonial Ogoni may not have invented Maxim guns and conquered the oceans, but they were able to work out a social and political engineering wherein neighbours lived at peace with each other, and no body ever went to bed hungry because they were poor.

The imposition of colonial rule on the Ogoni at the turn of the 20th century disrupted this political and social order. It was not just that the British deposed patriotic and honest village heads and murdered the particularly powerful ones, they put in their place stooges and ‘warrant chiefs’ who did their dirty work and treated their fellow Ogoni as subjects fit only to do Her Majesty’s bidding. Worse, the economic order, deriving from age-old Ogoni norms of self-reliance, reciprocity, and sustainability, was displaced by an imperial monetary economy that introduced scarcity, unemployment, and hunger where previously they had not existed.

It was in this milieu, underpinned by the general psyche appropriate to a conquered people, that Jim Beeson Wiwa grew up in the first and second decades of the 20th century. He began his working life as a forest ranger in the service of the colonial government. But it had not been his first choice. He had actually set up as a palm oil trader, but the Great Depression of the early 1930s, and the depredations of the British trading firms who even then had begun to displace indigenous merchants, forced him to close shop and seek alternative employment.

All through the turbulent 1930s and into the de-colonisation period of the 1940s and 1950s, Beeson Wiwa dug in and in the face of enormous difficulties, brought up his children and also attended to the needs of his large extended family. When civil war broke out in July 1967, he was in Umuahia, working as a market master. His eldest son, Ken, was on the Federal side, soon to be appointed Administrator for Bonny. His wives and other children were in Bane, Ogoni, trapped between retreating Biafran troops and advancing Federal infantry. These were difficult times.

The civil war ended in 1970 and he brought his family together again and resumed life as a loyal, hardworking citizen of Nigeria. He had never asked for much, only for the opportunity to earn a decent living and bring up his children as honest and diligent members of society. Pa Beeson was fiercely proud of his first born son, Ken. Right from his first days in Native Authority School, Bori, Ogoni in the late 1940s, Ken had demonstrated that he was gifted with an uncommon intelligence.

It is a tribute to Pa Beeson’s farsightedness and generosity of spirit that all the ingredients that were to come together to make the brilliant and intrepid writer and political thinker who was to humble the largest oil company in the world in the early 1990s with only a mere pen found a clement room to thrive and prosper under his roof. For there would never have been a Ken Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP without a determined, focused, and hard-working Beeson Jim Wiwa. He taught his eldest son the value of hard work, thrift, and honesty. But above all he taught him never to suffer fools and buffoons gladly and to always dig deep and find the courage to say truth to unaccountable and self-serving power.

In May 2004, aware that Pa Wiwa was getting on in years, and worried that his substantive words on the struggle of his people, the struggle that took the life of his beloved son, had not been recorded for posterity, I journeyed to his home in Bane, Ogoni. I went in the company of Patrick Naagbaaton, the talented and courageous Ogoni journalist and political activist.

He was clearly ailing now, but the Beeson Wiwa who received us on that fine May morning was still full of fire and defiance. He told me of the morning, now so long ago, when Ken came to him and sought his permission to lead the Ogoni to freedom from the tyranny of Shell and the Nigerian state.

‘It was a difficult decision for me to make,’ Pa Wiwa told me. ‘I asked my son, who will bury me after they have killed you? I asked him this question three times. But he was still determined to do something to save our people. In the end, I gave him my blessing.’

Truly, there is no greater love than this: that a father will give his first beloved son that the community might live.

Ike Okonta

Some Ogoni and ND resources

All Africa Environmental Rights Action Human Rights Watch Reports Various, Ogoni Factsheet  Corporate Watch Project Underground MOSOP

I propose a new theory of state failure in this second part of the essay. It is that the Nigerian state has collapsed, but Nigerian society has not. And it is this incredible resilience of the nation’s organic social institutions,  even in the teeth of the most brutal assaults from state actors long taken leave of their senses, that is still holding up the empty shell of a deadstate from disintegrating into a thousand warring pieces.

Nigeria is not yet Liberia or Somalia in the sense of the country’s power nodes imploding in a paroxysm of warlord politics and laying waste everything on its path. But in terms of practical effectiveness and strategic position in   global geopolitics, there is no difference between Somalia and Nigeria today.   There is no formal organized economic sector in Somalia presently. Nor is there one in Nigeria, practically speaking. The Nigerian Labour Congress and the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria are the two leading civil society  actors in matters economic in the country. Ordinarily, no meaningful government policy ought to be enacted without real input from these two actors, taking on-board their concerns and interests.

But policy-making in this sphere is largely President Obasanjo’s show even as Dr Okonjo-Iweala, the Finance Minister, is still battling to de-personalise and institutionalize the process of policy making. And Obasanjo, we must remind ourselves again and again, was not elected by the Nigerian people in
2003. His party, the PDP, rigged the presidential elections and forced Obasanjo on Nigerians against their will.

Policy-making in the nation’s economic sector is in the hands of election riggers. And this explains why, in spite of Obasanjo’s sundry exhortations to his key lieutenants to take the problems of the economy on hand and slay the  monster of poverty, Nigeria remains the most corrupt country in the world in which to do business six years after he took power. A corrupt election process can only sire a corrupt government. And corruption in government is the father of state failure.

State institutions charged with the task of providing Nigerians a modicum of social security have long collapsed. Old pensioners routinely die in long queues waiting for their monthly pensions. There is no social housing in our cities, which in turn have vegetated into sprawling slums breeding social misfits. The nation’s political ‘elites,’ acknowledging that our hospitals are still mortuary slabs two decades after Sani Abacha described them as such, now ferry themselves and their kin to European hospitals by special air ambulance when they fall ill. In our  universities, weed sprout where there should have
been libraries.

But it is in the domain of politics that my thesis of a failed state in a resilient civil society comes out in all its chilling truth. Political parties, properly understood, are constellations of interests and values in a given state. Those who establish them do so in order to form the government and thus advance their own political and economic interests, even as they proselytize on what they consider should be the proper social compass for the nation. The government thus formed, administers the institutions of the state on behalf of the people until the next round of elections.

If you remove banditry, what other interests and values coalesce the leading actors of the Peoples Democratic Party, the party of government in Nigeria? The ethics of the bandit is like the wind vane. It shifts with the wind as new  opportunities for looting make themselves manifest. The PDP is not a political party. It is actually a bizarre bazaar presided over by bandits whose latest loot is oil.  This explains why political assassinations in our country, most blatantly illustrated with the murder of Bola Ige, the nation’s chief law officer, is the weapon of choice in the political domain presently. This also explains the  rise of election rigging at all levels of Nigerian political society presently. Bandits do not participate in political debate. They enforce their interests through the barrel of the gun.

But even as the PDP ‘government’ is able to project bandit power within the country to overawe the political and civil opposition, its key functionaries are treated with a mix of derision and contempt in key international power  centers. Have you asked yourself how come it is only Dr Okonjo-Iweala that is wheeled out to battle on behalf of the nation in the international arena in moments of crisis? How come she is constantly on the wing, from London to Paris to Washington D.C., valiantly articulating and explaining and defending Nigeria’s position on such life and death matters as external debt cancellation and fair trade?

It is because there is no one else in Obasanjo’s merry crowd that international power players take seriously. Bandits, historically, have never been known to run efficient governments. Successive governmental failures, from Shehu Shagari to Obasanjo in 2005, invariably add up to state  collapse.  Which is what is now starring Nigerians in the face.  Yes, the Nigerian state has failed. But it is yet to collapse and  implode like  Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Please note my phrasing: ‘it is yet  to collapse…’ It is yet to collapse because ordinary Nigerians have shown themselves to be heroines and heroes several times over, propping up  the  tattered rafters of the decaying state on their bare shoulders.

Have you ever paused to think, as you leisurely stroll into Oyigbo Market in Lagos and buy a piece of yam from a market mammy, how come the piece of yam was able to make it to the market in the first place? And secondly, that the market woman is not charging you an arm and a leg for it in line with Obasanjo ’s new spirit of ‘price de-regulation?  Obasanjo’s government has refused, or even worse, has proved  spectacularly unable to provide the basic infrastructure – feeder roads, rural electricity, piped water, and community schools and heath centres – on which the Nigerian peasant should rely to produce the nation’s staples at maximum efficiency.   This farmer is still where he was when Frederick Lugard encountered him  at the  turn of the 20th century: hacking away with hoe and machete, at a time his counterparts in Europe and the United States are talking combine harvesters and genetically modified seeds.

And yet he is still soldiering on, and against all odds, putting  affordable yam pottage on our tables every morning. He is the epitome of Nigerian civil society. The Nigerian state, the latest manifestation of which is Obasanjo and his crowd of corrupt ministers, has failed him several times over, but he has refused to buckle. He is the only reason why Nigeria has not yet gone the way of Somalia.  The Obasanjo national dialogue is illegitimate as it is self-serving. But a nation in the grip of cholera cannot afford to be too choosy about elixirs. Be in no doubt about this: if Obasanjo’s latest comedy in Abuja, and after  it, Anthony Enahoro’s PRONACO, fails, the ghost of Somalia will become real in Nigeria. And sooner than you think.   This is not prophecy. It is a warning.

Ike Okonta